About a week ago I started reading Bret Easton Ellis’ 1987 novel The Rules of Attraction, a tale of indulgence and drama in a New England liberal arts college modeled after the one Ellis himself attended - Bennington College - at the time the most expensive university in the States.

Upon finishing the book I turned to the 2002 film adaptation of the same name. The movie captured the same bleak and lustful tone as the book, using a variety of impressive camera and editing tricks including a heavy dose of playing footage in reverse in the film's introduction and a fast-paced voice-over montage detailing one character’s exploits in Europe.

The film was written and directed by Robert Avary who is easily most well-known for winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction. Having known Tarantino since his video store days Avary uses many of the same quirky and propellant filmmaking techniques on show in Pulp Fiction in The Rules of Attraction.

One of these techniques was the use of Apple’s editing software Final Cut Pro, with Attraction becoming the very first Hollywood studio film to make use of the software. This and his work with Neil Gaiman on Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf, which used motion capture technology for its characters akin to those in The Polar Express show his tendency to be an early supporter of supposedly revolutionary technology in film, as he is now attempting to become with AI.

Before I get into Avary’s foray into AI I want to first recognize that this man may have one of the wildest Wikipedia pages out there. I fear it would make great toilet-reading. First off, there’s the story of Glitterati, a movie he finished in 2004 that is essentially a full-length version of the aforementioned European montage from The Rules of Attraction, using the same character, Victor. Despite having been finished for 22 years the film has never seen the light of day with Avary and Ellis citing both legal and 'ethical' concerns that make the film unreleasable.

And then of course there’s the time he spent in Ventura County Jail for manslaughter after crashing his car while drunk-driving in Ojai, California which resulted in the death of his passenger in 2008.

And now, almost two decades later, Avary is partnering with AI-forward Ex-Machina studios to adapt John Milton’s medieval epic poem Paradise Lost, all with the help of generative AI.

In an interview with Deadline - who seemed to be surprisingly receptive to the project - Avary said that the use of AI in the film would be more like a tool, allowing the sprawling and cosmic nature of the poem to come to computer-generated life at the fraction of the cost it would have taken normally, allowing the film to remain an indie-style production. The use of Ex-Machina’s proprietary AI will likely be restricted to only these 'world-building' elements with the script being penned by hand and Avary adamantly still working with real actors and an extensive film crew.

That, however, does not mitigate the pure fact that Avary is reducing one of the greatest tales ever told - the story of the fall of man and the temptation of Satan himself - to a 2-hour-long glorified piece of AI-slop. It is hard to imagine that the same software that created tung-tung-tung-sahur could create even a semblance of the grandeur this story deserves when adapted to the big screen.

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in the 17th Century he did not do it with a chatbot by his side. Only one neural-network was building his extensive, biblical world and that was his own. And now, in the great year of 2026 that very Satanic story can, ironically, be brought to you by the fruits of big tech.

This was meant to be a little more neutral but oh well. I do think it's a shame that a filmmaker whose work I quite liked has descended into the perils of AI. I will, however, be interested in how the film, and Ex Machina’s other projects turn out and whether AI really does just become a 'cost-cutting tool', as Avary describes it as, or if it becomes a creative sinkhole as many fear it may.

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I asked my dad what his ‘seminal’ work is. He told me he didn’t have one. Camus, however has The Stranger.

Whether its his best work I’m not sure but it one hundred and eleven pages have resonated around the globe, popularising Camus’ philosophy of absurdism - the idea that the world is not rational and therefore trying to interact with it in a rational manner is in itself irrational.

The novel’s main character - Mersault, a Franco-Algerian office worker in 20th Century Algiers - slowly comes to this realisation, sipping coffee tearless at his mother’s funeral, shooting an Arab on the beach because it was too hot, and finally raving at a Chaplain about the absurdities of life after being sentenced to death - not for kiling an Arab, but for going against the proverbial grain.

Camus adopts a hemingway-esque minimal prose; presenting a direct and objective first-person view of Mersault’s abnormal mind. Allowing the reader to tap straight into Mersault’s mind is vital as ensures the reader doesn’t just see a cold man unwilling to engage but instead a human who is willing and happy to engage but due to the afformentioned existentialist nature of our world, doesn’t feel the need to.

This liberty, however, is not on the cards for The Stranger’s 2025 adaptation. Due to the medium its working in and the understandable reluctance to have a narrator waffling throughout the entire picture the film opts to take a more disconnected - if that’s even possible - approach; at times feeling like an Eric Rohmer or Sofia Coppola film.

Wake up. Go to the office. Smoke a cigarette at Celeste’s. Go home. Smoke a cigarette at home. Go to the baths. Meet Marie. Take Marie home. Smoke cigarettes at home.

This structure characterises the majority of the first part of both the book and the movie. Monotous, dry, perhaps boring to some, and very-much making me want to visit Algiers. Mersault isn’t sad, but he isn’t necessarily happy. He doesn’t believe in love but doesn’t mind marrying Marie either way. He doesn’t even want to move Paris. Even I want to move to Paris.

This structure has no choice but to dissolve when, standing solitary on a beach - the sun glaring - Mersault looks at an Arab weilding a knife - the brother of his neighbours beaten mistress - and shoots.

I’m no philosopher, but this act; the pulling of a trigger five frictionless times - driving bullets into a lifeless pulp - acts as Camus’ ultimate hyperbole and his ultimate metaphor.

The world is meaningless. So why try to impose meaning? You can do what you want. But don’t kill someone. That’s bad.

After his lack of emotion is put on trial Mersault is sentenced to the guillotine. Like any man he grapples with this, dreaming of a way out. One day, despite his many refusals, a Chaplain walks into the cell. What follows is a barrage of blows. No Mersault does not believe in your ‘god’. Mersault does not believe in life after death. And no, Mersault does not need any of that to be happy.

“I understood that I had been happy, and I was happy. So that it might be finished, so that I might feel less alone, I could only hope that their would be many, many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would greet me with cries of hatred.”

P.S. Thanks for getting to the end. I am currently sitting at a grand total of one subscriber here on Substack (and that’s me) so it mean the world if you subscribed, restacked, or let me know what you think about The Stranger in the comments.

After scouring the internet for just about every film listing in New York County I eventually, and largely begrudgingly, booked one solitary ticket to a 4PM screening of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie - a mockumentary about almost everything but Kurt Cobain’s famed band of which younger me was obsessed by for about an hour thanks to Hugh Jackman singing Smells Like Teen Spirit as Black Beard in the flop that was 2015’s Pan (2.3 stars on Letterboxd. That’s almost as bad as Fan4stic).

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a great film to watch alone because when you’re in the film you’re not alone - you’re right there with Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol (the two writers of the film playing fictionalised versions themselves) as they undergo some utterly unpredictable shenanogans cross time, Toronto, and the CN tower.

The pair make up what they call Nirvana the Band - once again - not related to the much-cooler Nirvana as they attempt, desperately and miserably, to play at show at the Rivoli by just about every means but knocking on the owner’s door and asking.

The opening sequence of the film follows our unorthodox bandmates as they hatch a plan to skydive from the top of the CN tower and land in the middle of the Skydome - the home of the Toronto Blue Jays - as a game is being played and tell the crowd to go see them rock at the Rivoli - despite not actually having a show booked. But there’s a problem. The Skydome’s roof starts to close faster than the Straight of Hormuz and all of a sudden the pair are forced to turn to another plan - time travel.

In short, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a pretty crazy flick. At times it’s like watching a YouTube prank show, or quite literally taking a ride in a DeLorian but the whole way through it’s a good, funny time. 4.5 stars.

P.S. Despite my being MIA recently, I would love it if one of you readers who had the stamina to get through that incredibly long and detailed review would become my first subscriber other than myself. I might even be writing my own movie right now - who knows?

Josh Safdie’s ‘Marty Supreme’ is a tough film to love, but a damn-near impossible one to hate. A two-and-a-half-hour epic about ping pong is an interesting proposal, but the result? Perhaps even more interesting than initially proposed.

The titular Marty Mauser – played by a bold Timothee Chalamet – is a conniving, havoc-wreaking delinquent. He’s that one annoying friend who just won’t stop asking you for money. But, just like that one friend, you are charmed; pulled eloquently into Chalamet’s trap, because Marty has one thing no modern-day humans have: a drive, a purpose, a will to live.

Most of those in the western world seem to have lost that spark, that ambition, the deranged but glorious state Marty inhibits and refuses to leave.

Josh Safdie, in his first solo feature, captures an energy that is so human, so familiar, yet so alien. An energy of hope, an energy of years past. It’s the same energy that keeps you supporting your favourite sports team – even after a thrashing that brings you to tears. It’s the same energy that forces me to dunk my foam basketball in the middle of the night, waking up the whole building. It’s the same energy that wills me to write this review instead of spending quality time with my family on Christmas.

It’s an energy we all crave yet so rarely muster.

Paired with his brother Benny, Josh Safdie has made some pretty hectic films. Their last picture, ‘Uncut Gems’, is a roller-coaster ride through NYC’s enigmatic Diamond District, offering a viewing experience akin to riding a formula one car around a track, with no seatbelt, no experience, and no helmet.

‘Marty Supreme’ is no different, just this time the film sprawls across three continents, features the performance of the year, and a vast runtime that still leaves the viewer asking for more.

I’m not saying ‘Marty Supreme’ is a perfect picture, in fact it’s not even the film of the year. But what it does do well, it does incredibly well.

At the heart of the film is a relentless and charming performance from Timothee Chalamet. The film just wouldn’t work without him. Whether you like it or not he is a once-in-a-generation old-school movie star who navigates this performance with heart, desire, and control.

Chalamet is the reason people will come and see this movie, in fact, he is this movie. Timothee Chalamet is Marty Mauser. If you handed me a description of each’s personality and told me to spot the difference we’d be here for hours.

Many think this is a show that the actor has put on – a public mask to sell movie tickets. The problem with this philosophy, however, is thar conjuring up a marketing performance to make his movie successful is, well, exactly what Marty would do.

In Timothee’s own words he is “in pursuit of greatness”. He dreamt big, shot for the stars, whatever cheesy metaphor you can think of he did it, and in the end, I’d say it worked out; just like it did for Marty.

First there was Bong Joon-ho’s long awaited ‘Parasite’ follow up, ‘Mickey 17’. This space-faring sci-fi adaptation offered a pointed critique at the elite classes’ indifference toward their lower counterparts – Robert Pattinson literally plays ‘an expendable’. The main thread between all these films is established here also, a character – in this case played by Mark Ruffalo – whose cult of personality resembles a certain orange felon who I heard stopped 7 – no, maybe eight – wars that definetly already existed.

Next was ‘Eddington’. Ari Aster’s neo-Western set at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic features an online conspiracy theorist Austin Butler, an anti-vaxxer and BLM-despising sheriff played by Joaquin Pheonix, as well as liberal mayor Pedro Pascal. This star-studded A24 film highlights the dangers of modern America by demonstrating the immeasurable toll it takes on the fictional small town of Eddington. And for some food for thought, the movie opens with a data centre and closes with a data centre.

In September we got ‘One Battle After Another’, a Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece starring non-other than Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up revolutionary smoking weed, watching ‘The Battle of Algiers’, and struggling to raise his strong-willed teenage daughter. The film quite literally opens with a group of militants calling themselves the French 75 freeing immigrants from an ICE detention centre, need I say more?

And finally, that brings us to ‘Wake Up Dead Man’. The flick follows almost the same exact formula as the previous two Knives Out films, ridiculous-cast, Daniel Craig with an accent, puzzle-box murder mystery, and some social critique for good measure. This time however, the critique is heavily applied, imagine a 6-year-old, a full-to-the-brim jar of Nutella, and a plain, depressed pancake with a large surface-area.

‘Wake Up Dead Man’ has the balls to tackle some serious themes. The plot revolves around Josh O’Connor who plays a young Priest sent to a controversial church in upstate New York. Here he meets not Father Wicks, but Monsignor Wicks, an aggressive Priest played by Josh Brolin. Monsignor Wicks is not like other Priests, he is aggressive, angry, and enjoys scaring off newcomers to his church, leaving only a small group of misfit regulars. The Monsignor also has a sort of cult-of-personality about him, resembling a certain orange felon who I heard stopped 7 – no, maybe eight – wars that definetly already existed. Yes, I was too lazy to write a whole other inuendo to the fat man in The White House. Just go with it (no, not the Adam Sandler film, just the phrase).

The film also features an ‘alt-right bro’ who posts anything and everything to social media with a vlog setup that any budding influencer would be jealous of. It also lightly touches on its main subject matter, religion, with Benoit Blanc believing the whole thing to be lies and ‘storytelling’ despite Rian Johnosn also showing the benefits of organised religion through some touching scenes with Josh O’Connor.

With the social commentary out of the way, here are some general pointers:

· Josh O’Connor is amazing. Give him an Oscar nomination.

· The best Knives Out film so far, without a doubt.

· Gets really boring in the middle.

· Could have been 1 hour shorter.

· Landed the ending.

3 ½ stars.

Not in my wildest dreams would I have expected to walk a red carpet in 2025, yet, with some major caveats, just a couple of weeks ago this non-existant dream came true.

After securing some shockingly cheap tickets for the BFI London Film Festival a week earlier, me and my Dad made the 20 minute trip to the south bank of the river Thames, shirking the afformentioned carpet before making our way into an auditorium far too big for Nouvelle Vague’s 4:3 aspect ratio.

As you’ve probably guessed from the aspect ratio Richard Linklater’s new film (one of two coming out this year) Nouvelle Vague is a niche artsy flick. This, however does not stop me from proclaiming the black and white French- language picture a perfect film. While it isn’t five stars by any means of the imagination the movie has an aim, to tell the compelling story of the somewhat unorthodox making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless - and that - it does without without even the slightest hint of a flaw.

This is where I must admit that I am somewhat of a film-bro lightweight. I have not watched Breathless or any other film from the titular New Wave for that matter, but while The New Yorker describes Nouvelle Vague as Linklater’s big thank you to Godard - which it certainly is - I reserve the right to note that it holds up perfectly as a delightful and pleasing story.

The casting is excellent. Two men without wikipedia pages: Guillaume Marbec (Godard) and Audrey Dullin (then-not-so-famous actor Jean-Paul Belmondo) play the lead male roles to a tee. Zoey Deutch, who plays actress Jean Seberg is exceptional too.

If I may, I plan on going on a bit of a tangent here. Jean Seberg was one of the stars of Breathless as well as being a prominent character in Nouvelle Vague, but her life would probably make for a far more interesting movie than either of the two (I should probably watch Breathless before I make that claim but c’est la vie). She married three men (two with wikipedia pages), kind of married a fourth, and had two children, one with her husband Romain Gary and the other with Mexican revolutionary Carlos Nevarra. After donating over $10,000 to the Black Panther party she became a major target of the FBI. They stalked her interminably and practically blacklisted her from Hollywood. They even ran a fake news story in Newsweek magazine falsey claiming her second child - whom she was pregnant with at the time - a Black Panther. News of this story sent her into premature labour and her daughter’s eventual still birth. Romain Gary would go on to say that Seberg had repeatedly attempted suicide on the anniversary of this day. After nine days of disappearence in 1979 Seberg’s decomposing body was found in the back of her Renault along with a note adressed to her son. Charges where filed against persons unkown for “non-assistance of a person in danger.”

Point is: the performances are great.

Despite the distinct lack of colour and English my uncultered mind was still able to get completely lost in the story and the world of 1950s Paris with Godard’s quirky style of filmaking being a reliable source of both intrigue and comedy. This is, after all, a very funny movie. From Godard’s complete ignorance of film production norms, to Seberg’s continual annoyance, there is plenty to laugh at, as in many of Linklater’s films.

To end this review I shall present a fun fact: Daimonds are the hardest minerals in the Mohs scale.

This compact book (clocking in just shy of 120 pages including the introduction and afterword) presents an academic and well-researched future where Russia has moved on from their ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and has now decided to poke the potentially-Earth-shattering bear that is NATO’s Article 5.

The title of the book, If Russia Wins: A Scenario suggests that the narrative would go down the road of a full-scale Russian victory in Ukraine. Interestingly, this is not the case. Carlo Masala opted to go for a much more realistic end to the war where around 20% of Ukrainian territory is taken by Russia.

Masala describes this as a Ukrainian “capitulation” and uses this ‘victory’ for Russia as the driving force of the country’s continued military escalation. You see, in Russia this is seen as a monumental moment, the West had given up in the face of Russian demands - their invasion was a success.

Masala then goes on to describe a future in which Russia, now under new leadership, invades Estonia - a NATO member state - and captures the majority of the Russian-speaking city of Narva and the island of Hiiumaa in the Baltic Sea. Facing pressure from the west, Russia assures their enemies that they only seek to free the Russian people who were oppressed by the Estonian government. After much back and forth, NATO decides not to act and not to invoke article 5, undermining and perhaps eradicating the organization as a whole.

The scenario relies on three main principles:

1. Russia’s imperialist desires will never die. Russia and Vladimir Putin - despite his somewhat strange omittance from this book - want nothing less than a reunification of the former USSR. As diplomats, national security advisors, and academics have warned for years now, Russia is not content with an occupation of Ukraine. If they didn’t want to expand their empire they wouldn’t have invaded the country in the first place.

2. The US and many of its Western allies are growing tired of the Ukraine War. On page 15 of the UK edition, Masala highlights the growing support for far-right politicians in Europe and the US and how these far-right parties and ideologies have no room to keep supporting war in Ukraine. The US has become bored of Europe and would rather turn their head to what they see as the bigger threat: China, Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. To put it plainly, Western support for Ukraine is waning.

3. NATO is weak. In no world would the US or UK sacrifice New York or London for a small Estonian city of 60,000 on the Russian border. It just wouldn’t happen and Russia knows it. NATO is built on promises which can’t be kept and once they are broken NATO will surely be no more.

In conclusion, despite some strange and outlandish fringe predictions If Russia Wins: A Scenario is a stark and cold warning of an ever-more-stark-and-cold political landscape. Putin wants nothing but an ever-expanding empire and the end of the liberal world order (not that the liberal world order is a great option) and if anyone wants to stop him, the world needs to start waking up to that fact.